Alternatives to variable duration HMM in handwriting recognition

A successful handwritten word recognition (HWR) system using a variable duration hidden Markov model (VDHMM) and the path discriminant-HMM (PD-HMM) strategy is easy to implement. The central theme of the paper is to show that if the duration statistics are computed, it could be utilized to implement a model-discriminant-HMM (MD-HMM) approach for better experimental results. The paper also describes a PD-HMM based HWR system where the duration statistics are not explicitly computed, but results are still comparable to VDHMM based HWR scheme.